J.R. Carptenter's In Absentia

MSA – Week 1
J. R. Carpenter’s In Absentia
Overview

• Carpenter created In Absentia (mapped onto a Google satellite image - application programming interface (API) to “address issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal, where [she] lived for seventeen years.” Using the integrated landmarking feature of the Google Maps service, Carpenter associates specific geographic locations with the events that transformed Montreal until it was no longer recognizable, literally “mapping” out a digital record of lived experience.
• The artist statement describes it as “a site-specific web-based writing project”
• Can be therefore classified as an autobiographical narrative poem of the digital medium

Textual Elements

• Several writers, lending their voices in English and French
  • o multiple perspectives on Mile End
  • o collaborative writing as a convention for electronic literature
    • § as a deliberate collaboration
    • § author intentionality
    • Bilingual but very little provision for translation,
      • o The idea that even if sections are in French and not readable it does not detract from the experience of being part of this neighborhood. Indeed, it invites the reader to consider the former diversity of this particular community
      • o Additionally, many of the non-English phrases can be easily inferred from context (i.e., the ‘for rent’ sign leads to a description offering a residence for rent)

Digital Modality Specifics

• Limited instruction and guidance forces the reader to experiment with the interactive digital elements
• The interactive structure is very static, but at the same time is not limiting in how we move across the five maps and move within the maps
  • o five ‘maps’: à louer (for rent), à vendre (for sale), perdu (lost), trouvé (found), vide (empty)
  • o plays on the idea of how the Google Maps interface functions with different searches
  • Digressions that lead the reader into their own journey of discovery
    • o challenges the linearity of narrative construction
    • o the reader/user is drawn into the story by being given a sense of agency
    • a locative narrative - representing space as it is lived and experienced
    • image as iconography,
      • o a pastiche of ideas, images, people, places, lexias
        • § Carpenter considerably complicates the sign-signifier relationship

Analysis/Interpretation

• a play on macro/micro images
  • o choice of using Google maps, which in itself is such a ubiquitous tool
  • o Posthumanist viewpoint of the world
  • the sense of distance analogous to the speaker’s temporal distance from the neighborhood
  • spatial interrelationships between people, places, and neighborhood spots
    • o a cultural commentary,
    • o a bridge between the physical and digital worlds,
    • o social activism “hackivist”
    • the affective nature of the factual/fictional ‘world’
    • ghosts in the neighborhood, superimposed over the ever changing satellite view of the city
      • o a nostalgia from what could have been but for larger political, social, economic forces
        • § what is lost when businesses and corporations usurp the city.
        • Displacement by Modification:
          • o Naomi Klein reads Said’s Postcolonial theory as pertaining to this process of alienating residents from the land on which they live, essentially transporting them to a new place without actually moving them. This “revisioning” of the land defamiliarizes it from the residents, confusing their association of experience and geography and thus complicating the way they process trauma and joy.

Other
Klein, Naomi. “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World.” London Review of
Books, June 2016, pp. 11-14.